ADBE hosts Vertical Design Week 2022
BA (Hons) Product Design students in their first and second year of study spent the week exploring the potential of Artificial Intelligence based tools within the design process.
Vertical Design Week (VDW) is an annual event organised to foster greater community among students across all levels of our BA (Hons) Product Design courses.
The focus of this year's VDW event was to explore the potential and future applications of AI-powered text-to-image generation tools within the design process.
Platforms such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion use advanced AI diffusion models to generate unique images driven by text descriptors.
Students participated in workshops that introduced them to these tools and provided frameworks on how to achieve successful results.
To close the week, teams were tasked with completing a design brief that allowed them to apply their creativity and challenged them to visualise scenarios based on future design trends.
The output of this brief took the form of a series of short movies that were premiered at the end of the week.In addition to attending the workshops, students were introduced to the digital VR tool Gravity Sketch.
VDW was complimented with inspiring lectures delivered by Shay Moradi (VP of Innovation and Experiential Technology at Vital), Julio Alejandro (Tech Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist, JADA Consulting), Stephy Fung (Digital Fashion Artist) and Qasim Iqbal and Jagdeep Jutley (NTU MArch students).
Vertical Design Week was led by lecturers Ian Campbell Cole and Chris Hanley.
Commenting on the success of the event, Ian said:
"I believe that AI text-to-image will have a significant impact on our roles as designers. Exactly what impact remains to be seen but I believe that introducing emerging technologies presents our students with the opportunity to have a truly competitive edge as and when they enter industry.
I've been super impressed with what our 1st and 2nd years have managed to achieve in a very short period of time. Their work output is testament to their ability to collaborate, their work ethic and hunger to learn."